January 9, 2014

"I made this claim because of Harris-Perry's background," he says, reciting achievements from her resume. Somebody has to be America's foremost public intellectual, right? Actually, that's not right, and any time you create a superlative, you're inviting dispute. Coates humorously restates his designation as the "TNC Public Intellectual Prize," which retracts the invitation. In TNC's opinion, MHP is America's foremost public intellectual. Okay, then... never mind. She's a public intellectual — aren't we all?

And we're all entitled to have our personal favorites, not that I can think of mine, and if I could, I wouldn't use the expression "America's foremost public intellectual." I'd say "my favorite public intellectual." And doesn't that really show Coates's sleight of hand? Both "America's" and "foremost" imply that this isn't a matter of his personal preference or even his opinion of who is the best, but an observation of prominence in America. "Foremost" doesn't mean best. It means first in rank, and to speak in terms of what is "foremost" is to claim that there is a rank. Why do that?
Coates has a special problem with Dylan Byers at Politico: "What sets Byers apart is the idea that considering Harris-Perry an intellectual is somehow evidence of inferior thinking." Ah! That made me see that the reason to visualize a ranking and to put your favorite intellectual at the top of the claimed ranking is that you feel that you've been put down and you need to fight back. Coates didn't just "consider[] Harris-Perry an intellectual." He proclaimed her "America's foremost public intellectual." If we're talking about inference from the evidence, let's be accurate about what the evidence is.

Coates offers this explanation, revealing more of his mindset:

I came up in a time when white intellectuals were forever making breathless pronouncements about their world, about my world, and about the world itself. My life was delineated [by] lists like "Geniuses of Western Music" written by people who evidently believed Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin did not exist. That tradition continues. Dylan Byers knows nothing of your work, and therefore your work must not exist.

Coates describes his own experience feeling subordinated by proclamations of greatness. Unnamed "white intellectuals" constantly effused about great geniuses and left black people off the list. That's how he feels. I feel that I've seen white people breathlessly idolize Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin — and many other black musicians (e.g., Duke Ellington) — since at least 1975, the year Coates was born. But he's speaking subjectively about how he feels, and he, not Byers, is the one who used the phrase "inferior thinking."

When I wrote "Ah!" above, it was because the phrase "inferior thinking" made me think about having troubling feelings that one has been treated as inferior, and that seemed like an explanation for why Coates may have wanted to declare Melissa Harris-Perry "America's foremost public intellectual."

But what Byers actually wrote was: "Ta-Nehisi Coates's claim that 'Melissa Harris-Perry is America's foremost public intellectual' sort of undermines his intellectual cred, no?" That is, Byers didn't imply that Coates seems to have an inferiority complex. Byers meant Coates's declaration makes him seem inferior. Obviously, that's got to be really aggravating for Coates, and I can see why he chose to process that slam into a more general observation that white people are continually disrespecting black people. You can hear the aggravation in Coates's grandiose, abstract, free-swinging conclusion:

Here is the machinery of racism—the privilege of being oblivious to questions, of never having to grapple with the everywhere...

Coates, by contrast, must fight, he must grapple with the everywhere — the racism that is everywhere and invisible to white men like Byers.

... the right of false naming; the right to claim that the lakes, trees, and mountains of our world do not exist...the right to insult our intelligence with your ignorance.

That is to say: I'm not unintelligent. You are unintelligent. I see so many things that are invisible to you, and that's my superiority, to counter and to trump your superiority.

The machinery of racism requires no bigotry from Dylan Byers. It merely requires that Dylan Byers sit still.

That is: Byers is intellectually lazy, accepting the world as he, a white man, sees it. He's inferior.

We suffer for this. So many people charged with informing us, with informing themselves, are just sitting still.

Suddenly, at the end of TNC's essay, we are in the presence of everybody, everywhere, all the suffering, all the racism and the ignorance of racism, all the complacency. Left far behind is the silly assertion that "Melissa Harris-Perry is America's foremost public intellectual."

Anybody else want to say that's dumb after this very grand and righteous and intellectual assault on that tiny little man Dylan Byers?

I'm sure Coates could find a way to explain Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor as intricately related to America's Jim Crow laws at the time. All he can see in everything is white racism and black victimization.

Anybody else wants to say that's dumb after this very grand and righteous and intellectual assault on that tiny little man Dylan Byers?

I am tired of these people always whining. Their whole MO is to 'assault' the little people. Someone, somewhere did not give these people their due -- it is always that and tiring and boring and uninspiring. Why can't they use the opportunities they get to assimilate with others and throw the boulder (not the chip) that sits on their shoulders? Hopefully, if they did that, their children may grow up to think they are humans like the rest of us and not BLACK humans.

Coates does raise a good question--who actually is "America's foremost" public intellectual? I don't even know who my own favorite public intellectual is.

I do know what my favorite pizza topping is (anchovies), and can hazard a guess for what America's Foremost topping is (pepperoni), but I'm sure if someone asked TNC he'd say they were just reflecting white racism because pizza toppings are just too Eurocentric and we should be discussing traditional African cuisine.

Micheal Totten: "They must themselves have been energetic, productive, and creative people. Their society must have been considerably more complex and sophisticated than Castro can admit without destroying the rationale of his own rule. In the circumstances, therefore, it became ideologically essential that the material traces and even the very memory of that society should be destroyed.”

Doris May Lessing: "It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care."

Melissa Harris-Perry: "One of these things is not like the other [giggle]."

Has Coates read James Baldwin? Some of it, I would guess. He should read Baldwin again. There was a public intellectual. Baldwin took his audiences seriously, white and black. He thought about things. He was original, and much of what he wrote still seems so.

Then he might remember what a public intellectual is. Among other things, Baldwin was public. People knew of him, even if they had not read him.

It seems a bit unfair to me, to say that after reading Coates's post, "Left far behind is the silly assertion that 'Melissa Harris-Perry is America's foremost public intellectual.'"

Yes, he broadens his scope beyond MHP to talk about WHY his claim would be dismissed by Byers, but "left far behind" is overly strong to me. ("silly assertion," however, seems about right to me. Why counter those "great white men" Lists Coates abhors, with a different list? The idea of ranking obviously subjective things in such an objective way is indeed silly and I am glad that it is not very prevalent anymore).

But yet and still. If you follow the link, you can see that of MHP Coates writes in two rather substantial paragraphs, in the heart of his post:

"I made this claim because of Harris-Perry's background: Ph.D. from Duke; stints at Princeton and Tulane; the youngest woman to deliver the Du Bois lecture at Harvard; author of two books; trustee at the Century Foundation. I made this claim because of her work: I believe Harris-Perry to be among the sharpest interlocutors of this historic era—the era of the first black president—and none of those interlocutors communicate to a larger public, and in a more original way, than Harris-Perry.

Now Melissa Harris-Perry neither needs (nor likely much cares about) my endorsement. Regrettably, there's no cash attached to the 'TNC Public Intellectual Prize.' Moreover, other people will make other cases. What sets Byers apart is the idea that considering Harris-Perry an intellectual is somehow evidence of inferior thinking.

LarsP wrote:

"Instead of debating the meaning of 'foremost', we need to nail down the definition of 'intellectual.'"

...aaaaaaand, blamo!, that seems to be Coates's very point. He is arguing that Byers sees through a lens that cannot conceive of MHP as an "intellectual," let alone a "foremost" one. This is a discussion woth having.

I still think that the buried lede is that Ta-Nehisi Coates went out of his way to set up Melissa Harris-Perry as "Ameirca's Foremost public intellectual" seemingly as a direct and proximate result of her having presided over a racially invidious television show, and then apologizing for what she herself seems to have conceded was terrible judgment.

The whole thing strikes me as not even being a serious attempt to gauge something like a "foremost intellectual." It strikes me as a way for Coates to try to say (without actually saying so), "she was right the first time; let's quit all of the apologizing."

Racism is a normal human trait bequeathed to us by evolution. Until we recognize that whites are racists, blacks are racists, Orientals are racists, everyone is racist we will never be able to deal with racism intelligently.

Racism (aka tribalism)is one reason that it is so important to have equality under the law. That is the exact opposite of modern racial politics. The main problem in the old South wasn't that whites were prejudiced against blacks but that the government codified these prejudices into unequal treatment by the law based on race. This situation has improved somewhat for blacks although it is still far from ideal under the present system of quotas and race based preferences.

Capitalism is another important remedy for racism. Capitalism provides a method for different races to interact in a way that treats all races fairly. Any time government chooses winners and losers and distributes wealth through politics, political clout not merit becomes all important. Political clout depends upon membership in the right group and quickly leads to tribalism. This is why the left are always thinking about race day and night. Their obsession with race is why they think everyone else is obsessed with race. This obsession is why lefties call anyone who disagrees with them "racist".

She has a PhD, so I guess she's a credentialed intellectual, for whatever that's worth.

I think we should focus more on the "public" aspect. Her main (only?) outlet to the public is MSNBC. I only hear about the most inane things she does (tampon earrings, ridiculing babies) like almost everyone else in America, because we aren't forced to watch MSNBC. If you're the "foremost public" anything and all you do is be on MSNBC, then it must be a tiny niche of a thing, and that doesn't sound like "public intellectual" to me.

I'd have to think that if we had a foremost public intellectual, it would probably be someone like Krugtron. He seems to have a fair amount of influence and reach.

"Public intellectual," unfortunately, is one of those niches that you see people perpetually wangling for. Cornel West, for example, is quite desperate to be thought of as a "public intellectual." Ditto Noam Chomsky; ditto, also, Stanley Fish and Camille Paglia, both of whom at least deserve the title. I'd throw in Nat Hentoff and Stanley Crouch, both of whom have a massively larger body of work, on any number of topics, than does Ms. Harris-Perry.

I mean:

I made this claim because of Harris-Perry's background: Ph.D. from Duke; stints at Princeton and Tulane; the youngest woman to deliver the Du Bois lecture at Harvard; author of two books; trustee at the Century Foundation.

Apart from the Du Bois lecture (an honor I should think de facto unavailable to anyone not Black), that's the kind of resume held by scads of youngish academics. It doesn't make you the "foremost" anything.

Not that I have one, or claim to be an intellectual, but people with a couple of books under their belt and a PhD are a dime a dozen. So, lets give MHP the title of intellectual, but foremost and public?

If we were to limit the contenders of foremost public intellectual (FPI) to black Americans, then Sowell, Thomas and Rice would top the list IMHO. But okay, this is TNC, so lets further limit this to people on the left. Aren't Cornell West and Skip Gates far more prominent than MHP?

"'Public intellectual,' unfortunately, is one of those niches that you see people perpetually wangling for. Cornel West, for example, is quite desperate to be thought of as a "public intellectual." Ditto Noam Chomsky; ditto, also, Stanley Fish and Camille Paglia, both of whom at least deserve the title. I'd throw in Nat Hentoff and Stanley Crouch, both of whom have a massively larger body of work, on any number of topics, than does Ms. Harris-Perry."

I don't know how you presume to know that any of the persons you have named are "quite desperate to be thought of as a 'public intellectual,'" or why you think people are "perpetually wrangling for"such a designation.

I like about half of TNC's writing and do not have a problem thinking of him as a public intellectual. Unlike most bloggers, who largely just recycle news stories, he often adds something to the debate.

Tyler Cowen suggests Andrew Sullivan as the most influential public intellectual. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/who-is-the-most-influential-public-intellectual-of-the-last-twenty-five-years.html

"Instead of debating the meaning of 'foremost', we need to nail down the definition of 'intellectual.'"

...aaaaaaand, blamo!, that seems to be Coates's very point. He is arguing that Byers sees through a lens that cannot conceive of MHP as an "intellectual," let alone a "foremost" one. This is a discussion woth having.

There seems to be a general understanding an intellectual is something more than a public commenter or pundit. Maybe it requires deeper thinking, or maybe empiricism. Maybe the appearance of honestly evaluating circumstances rather than cheerleading. Something more than a mere political advocate. I'm sure many standards might apply.

Does MHP meet any such standard that would be failed by Rush? She thinks stunts like tampons as earrings are funny, and she panders to the lowest of the left with her race baiting. She appears on a TV network primarily known for valuing political advocacy over honesty or any other principle.

But instead of considering those facts, Coates claims those who don't consider her an intellectual are racist. Weak sauce.

Never heard of her. I have heard all of the other names people in this thread have mentioned. I think that's a good anecdotal proof that she's not "public" enough.

Based on influence, and having heard of them, here's my list.

Noam Chomsky (not a fan, but everyone's head of him.) Hugely influential if you like him or not.

Andrew Sullivan. He created gay marriage. That's a big deal.

Jared Diamond. Pushes mostly nonsense now, but "Guns, Germs and Steel," got people talking about why the world is the way it is.

Niall Ferguson. Perpetual doomsaying isn't popular, but his analysis of what happened in the World Wars brought home the self-destrution of Western Civilization in a way that a pure military history cannot.

My favorites, who are not very popular, are Walter Russel Mead and Francis Fukuyama. They worry about institutional decay and social change, which I think are what we need to address.

If the gong for foremost public intellectual goes to the person who first and most publicly promoted an extremely unlikely idea that became reality then Sullivan wins easily. I think even Sullivan would expect a broader definition. He would probably have voted for Christopher Hitchens.

OK, these are probably good books, based on reviews, but they aren't much of a basis for being the foremost public intellectual. If the subject matter is important, then why not go with Cornell West? It seems to me that it's the same thing, he's done more work, and he's not dead yet.

I don't know how you presume to know that any of the persons you have named are "quite desperate to be thought of as a 'public intellectual,'" or why you think people are "perpetually wrangling for"such a designation.

I wrote "wangling," not "wrangling." They do not mean the same thing.

I would say that someone who, like Cornel West, gets all huffy when someone fails to take his new hip-hop CD as the sort of serious scholarship Harvard University expects its top-paid professors to produce really, really wants to be regarded as a "public intellectual," i.e., as someone whose every utterance is to be regarded as gold.

His response to Larry Summers' mild suggestion that he produce something slightly more scholarly was to announce that he was packing up all his toys and going to play in Princeton's front yard instead, so there. Given that Peter Singer was already there, he didn't even get to be the most reprehensible member of the faculty.

BTW, I just started reading my autographed copy of Terry Teachout's Duke. It is not about John Wayne. It's about Duke Ellington. The white man from Limbaugh country thinks he is a genius. He must not have gotten the Western Music message.

Television should not be the basis for being a public intellectual, and a public intellectual by definition needs to be read outside of academia. Looking at these books she wrote they are probably in college bookstores across the country. I'm positive that many recent college grads have read them.

Coates and Harris-Perry are two of America's foremost mediocrities. In the category of public intellectuals I would put Victor David Hanson. Having opinions and writing about them in a way that subjects and verbs agree does not make one an intellectual even if the writing and thinking is sometimes stimulating. One has to have some confidence that the "public intellectual" has read and studied extensively even deeply,possibly in more than one language. Hanson qualifies. Hitchens qualified. Coates and Harris-Perry, I would wager, have fewer books combined in their libraries than I do. And I have read most of mine. What have they written? Three books between?

Still, I suppose it is an achievement when one considers that all of Africa's ideas were stolen by the Greeks, a thesis proffered by another black public intellectual some years back.

You mean Martin Bernal of Black Athena fame. He died last year, but did manage to publish the second and third volumes of his argument first. I hadn't thought of him for nigh on 20 years. I would be curious to see whether his Vol. 3 (on "the linguistic evidence") deals with the amazing smackdown two linguists gave Black Athena in a volume of essays on it. That was the most thorough demolition of an academic argument I've seen since Allan Bloom reviewed John Rawls' A Theory of Justice.

Michael said...Coates and Harris-Perry are two of America's foremost mediocrities. In the category of public intellectuals I would put Victor David Hanson. Having opinions and writing about them in a way that subjects and verbs agree does not make one an intellectual even if the writing and thinking is sometimes stimulating. One has to have some confidence that the "public intellectual" has read and studied extensively even deeply,possibly in more than one language. Hanson qualifies. Hitchens qualified. Coates and Harris-Perry, I would wager, have fewer books combined in their libraries than I do. And I have read most of mine. What have they written? Three books between?

Still, I suppose it is an achievement when one considers that all of Africa's ideas were stolen by the Greeks, a thesis proffered by another black public intellectual some years back.

I am not sure if this was intended but this post drips with condescension.

From wikipedia: VDH wrote of Rumsfeld that he was: "a rare sort of secretary of the caliber of George Marshall" and a "proud and honest-speaking visionary" whose "hard work and insight are bringing us ever closer to victory".

Public intellectuals of all stripes are ripe for mockery. Apparently none more so than VDH.

Brando said...Coates does raise a good question--who actually is "America's foremost" public intellectual? I don't even know who my own favorite public intellectual is."

While who is America's foremost intellectual is open for debate by process of elimination it's easy to determine who isn't America's foremost intellectual. MHP just doesn't make it in to the running.If he were alive today George Carlin would be a far more credible candidate.

Dylan Byers loses all street cred when he names Naom Chomsky and Susan Sontag as preferable to MHP--although lately Sontag has been doing her best work. Conservative thinkers are the true invisible men in academia........If I were into classical music I would probably put a higher value on Mozart and Beethoven than Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong belongs in the canon, but not in the classical music section. Is it possible that Coates' irritability is as put on as the happy smiles of the field hands that that Duck Dynasty guy encountered.

Michelle Dulak Thompson: There was an entire volume "Not Out of Africa" which also demolished the preposterous thesis. I do like to bring up the topic in relation to the thin intellectual life of black Africa. It offers a plausible reason if you are gullible enough to think that an idea can vanish from the brain and into the minds of crafty white Europeans.

From wikipedia: VDH wrote of Rumsfeld that he was: "a rare sort of secretary of the caliber of George Marshall" and a "proud and honest-speaking visionary" whose "hard work and insight are bringing us ever closer to victory".

You write that as if his Rumsfeld comment is mockable. It is, in fact, a fair and wise observation about DR.

These statements are eminently mockable based on the results of the occupation of Iraq. If you can't see that, you should probably get out a little more. Rumsfeld was effectively sacked by Bush after his re-election.

William said...Dylan Byers loses all street cred when he names Naom Chomsky and Susan Sontag as preferable to MHP--although lately Sontag has been doing her best work. Conservative thinkers are the true invisible men in academia........If I were into classical music I would probably put a higher value on Mozart and Beethoven than Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong belongs in the canon, but not in the classical music section. Is it possible that Coates' irritability is as put on as the happy smiles of the field hands that that Duck Dynasty guy encountered.

1/9/14, 10:51 AM

Mozart and Beethoven weren't composing classical music in their day, they were composing the popular music of their day. They were simply among the best of their genre of their time. Armstrong wasn't composing what we call today classical music, he was composing a genre of American popular music of his day and in that he was among the best. I suspect that in a couple centuries from now Armstrong will still be listened to and in that time he will be considered a classical musician as well in his genre of music.

Black privilege: the ability to assume any criticism or bad action that happens to you is because of your race. Also, the ability to imply anyone who hurts you in some way is doing so because they are racist or don't understand race history.

White straight men just have to take criticism and bad actions at face value.

It has been reported that Chris Mathews is a finalist for America's Foremost Northeast Librul Caucasian Intellectual. Be on the lookout for him to have a condom hanging from each ear in an upcoming show. It will put him over the top.

Chuck said @ 8:53 a.m.: The whole thing strikes me as not even being a serious attempt to gauge something like a "foremost intellectual." It strikes me as a way for Coates to try to say (without actually saying so), "she was right the first time; let's quit all of the apologizing."

I think that is spot on. As Coates said in his first MHP piece, there's a "weighty subtext" involved in the situation of "a black child being reared by a family whose essential beliefs were directly shaped by white supremacy, whose patriarch sought to lead a movement which derives most its energy from white supremacy."

If you are lucky enough to still be here, future historians will certify that for you.

This has to be my least favorite form of the appeal to authority: appeal to someone in the future who is therefore not available to endorse or refute your statement.

If you know enough about a subject to know how future authorities will assess it, then you don't need them, say it based on your own authority. If not, don't try to appropriate theirs.

I suppose you think I didn't think of that? You would be wrong.

'AReasonableMan', in case you haven't noticed, is a special kind of case of close-minded dumb. He will put zero importance to my opinion, so I merely told him to wait awhile, and perhaps even liberal historians will catch up the truth, and agree with me.

A good rule of thumb is, if you find yourself thinking of something obvious, and you then think 'I bet SomeoneHasToSayIt didn't take that into account', best pause and think again.

he meets black school children in safe passage zones and is reminded of himself. he rails against the cops who did not introduce themselves or seem to recognize him and seemed resentful of his presence interviewing the children who should usually be moving on.

then he gets his moment.the cop runs their plate and writes a ticket to the rental company, before he heads back to his hotel downtown to practice his french. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/how-to-read-camus-like-a-boss/282408/

guess what. the cop -- white black or spanish -- was there the next shift, and the next and the next, whilst mr. coates was back to listening about oppression on audiotape.

I mean, Coates could have responded to Byers without invoking race, because there was no reason for race to be a part of it. And how laughable in the whole butt hurt brouhaha they both completely ignore conservative intellectuals. Doesn't that just drive home how ridiculous it is for TNC to view this through a racial lens?

"How dare you keep black people off your list! We all know its conservatives who don't belong there!"

If you are lucky enough to still be here, future historians will certify that for you.

The ensuing discussion of this statement is a great demonstration of why you should never explain a joke. Though in fairness, I can't tell if IIB was actually joking about turning SHTSI's joke into an appeal to authority. It's funny either way!

Look, T-N Coates' father was a Black Panther. You cannot get more down than that, more authentic, more up-close to near out-and-out rebellion than that. Serious shit. So T-N grows up and goes to college but doesn't finish because he wants, has, to get into writing. Journalism. To write about his many experiences of being black and the son of an oppressed rebel who nearly started a revolution and possibly being oppressed himself. Except in many more nuanced and subtle ways than his father who had had it up to here with oppression. So T-N Coates is hyper on the ball sensitive to oppression, especially the hidden kind, because it is in his fucking DNA. So listen up to T-N.

This Coates guy is a nasty racist who bans anyone who calls out his racism.---------

He does not accept criticism, period.

When black professors took issue at one of his earlier proclamations on black history, he yelled louder in bigger more prestigious places. I really do think he gets a lot of commenters from his father's party days -- it's so 'this is the best thing i ever read. only you can tell it' it is almost unbelievable.

but the liberal whites are linking, and paying him to teach writing, even though he admits using audiobooks and audiodictation to complete his thoughts on race, much of which came from propaganda pamphlets, self published by his father's organization.

he hasn't been vetted by any scholars, black or white, in terms of degreed work or non-memoir published work. unless you count the liberal rags looking desparately for black talent.

It used to be that an intellectual commented on the current situation in the light of the tradition - that made him an intellectual because he didn't just respond to the circumstances around him. Then some took to saying that their comment was that the Western tradition was invalid - e.g. bourgeois reactionaries or dead while males. They wanted to substitute some other tradition e.g. Marxist writings or feminist studies. This line of thought is pretty much of a dead end at this time - no great Marxist writers or philosophers, not even historians or economists - no one from the Thirties that people are still commenting on. No current great women writers or philosophers coming out of the universities. So to me, MHP is not an intellectual because she isn't commenting on her own tradition and asking why there's less there than in Harlem in the Twenties - she is trying to kill the western tradition as many others have also tried to do. It's no more than some Egyptian Pharaoh scratching his predecessors' names off their monuments and writing his own in their place and doing this because he could not build any thing of his own of equal value.

POLA 4010: Hip-Hop & Feminism This course seeks to address, analyze, explore and contest the political aspects of hip-hop music and culture through a close examination of feminism. This course is an analytic space for debate and discussion about the impact of hip-hop culture on the sexual, gender and political understandings of Americans and others around the world.

...aaaaaaand, blamo!, that seems to be Coates's very point. He is arguing that Byers sees through a lens that cannot conceive of MHP as an "intellectual," let alone a "foremost" one. This is a discussion woth having.

If somebody opts to not carry themselves or speak like an intellectual, people won't take them seriously as one.

Sowell, Sowell, Sowell. Definitely. Walter Williams, perhaps. I wouldn't call Rice a public intellectual, though, because her scope seems to small. That's why so few Nobel prize winners get such a title: they may be giants in their field, but that's not what being a p.i. is about.

As to MDT's nominations, Fish and Paglia for sure. Hentoff and Crouch, not so sure--I guess I just have a narrower definition of the term, such that I only want to award it to people who have substantially advanced our thinking in multiple, broad areas; not merely those who have help promote such advances.

Chomsky, sure (but alas!) Sontag, yeah.

But come off it, you people (and you know who you are)--Mr. Limbaugh is perhaps the greatest or most influential public proponent of a certain point of view, but being a PR and Marketing person (or being an entertainer) is NOT the same thing as being an intellectual.

"VDH is a Democrat (registered). He just doesn't act like one. [emphasis modified]"

Sure he is; just not a thoroughly modern one.

he's every bit in the tradition of folks like HHH, Truman, my dad, and some of the rural state-government D's we have here in WA state (who so dislike what the modern party is doing that they're actually caususing with the R's in our state senate, taking control away from its rightful owners, the lib dems mostly from the Seattle area. Boo hoo.)

Why not? "Intellectual" is a squishy, worthless term with no substantive qualitative underpinning to it - the modern equivalent of the 19th century accolade "philosopher". It basically means "pundit with high status". Although I agree that Limbaugh isn't exactly who I'd field in such a pissing contest. A lot of people seem to be fond of Thomas Sowell for that laurel, although I haven't read him since I was a teenager...

Coates does seem desperate to claim his own little cheesecloth-square snippet of this "intellectual" business, and the best way to bootstrap your way into public intellectuality is to Boswell your betters, and what better way to do that than to mint your very own intellectuals? If you do it right, they'll do the same for someone else, and that someone else will do the same for you, and you'll all bask in your mutual affirmatory circle-jerk.

Oh! Nate Silver.

I don't think a quant, however clever and of however good a track-record, can really lay claim to the status of "public intellectual". Ironically enough, science and math geniuses don't get to be public intellectuals unless they've stooped to becoming clownshow parodies of themselves. Even a Richard Feynman, as brilliant and storied as he was, still relied heavily on his store of clever, accessible parables to make his public mark. Or Bertrand Russell, for that matter, although his clownshow aspects were along political lines rather than his skills as a raconteur.

My favorites, who are not very popular, are Walter Russel Mead and Francis Fukuyama. They worry about institutional decay and social change, which I think are what we need to address.

I think those are good choices, although Fukuyama seems to specialize in being cleverly wrong in an unfortunate fashion.

He would probably have voted for Christopher Hitchens.

That's the thing, I wouldn't call Hitchens a public intellectual, if only because he lacked the primary characteristic distinguishing statesmen, pundits and intellectuals: the credentials. Hitchens was an ascended journalist, not a defrocked academic.

Victor Davis Hanson

He counts, he's a serious historian with a long list of real work that predate his punditry. I read his Western Way of War in college, albeit for pleasure rather than a class. And his later books are much less serious, more pop-cult light, than his early work, which often characterizes "public intellectual syndrome".

Dylan Byers loses all street cred when he names Naom Chomsky and Susan Sontag as preferable to MHP

Well, Noam Chomsky is getting a little long in the tooth, but in his time was the very epitome of "public intellectual" - and a sterling example, along with Linus Pauling - of why the breed fell out of favor with any self-respecting member of the commons. More often than not, the "public intellectual" trades on her deep knowledge in one field, to pontificate upon all sorts of fields in which, in point of fact, she most likely knows less than your garden-variety educated individual.

I'm barely willing to accept her as "an intellectual", after having looked at her CV.

Foremost?

Seriously?

That's inane even for Coates, who I don't think is a very serious thinker in the first place.

(I mean, I don't pay a lot of attention to general popular culture ... but I'd assume that a truly foremost public intellectual, by nature of being the foremost public one, must precisely be someone I've heard of before Coates said it.

I could comprehend - thought disagree with - any number of other candidates.

But Harris-Perry? She's almos a non-entity as a "public intellectual".

"In Fall 2013, Professor Harris-Perry is teaching the following course:

POLA 4010: Hip-Hop & FeminismThis course seeks to address, analyze, explore and contest the political aspects of hip-hop music and culture through a close examination of feminism. This course is an analytic space for debate and discussion about the impact of hip-hop culture on the sexual, gender and political understandings of Americans and others around the world."

"When I wrote "Ah!" above, it was because the phrase "inferior thinking" made me think about having troubling feelings that one has been treated as inferior, and that seemed like an explanation for why Coates may have wanted to declare Melissa Harris-Perry "America's foremost public intellectual."